Talkoot software appliance for collaborative science

On the emerging ¿Social Web,¿ millions of people offer their knowledge online in a collective knowledge system comprising an active community of motivated members posting problems and solutions in blogs, forums, mailing lists, collaborative portals and other Web 2.0 technologies. These technologies complement formal means of sharing knowledge via conferences and published papers, where it is impossible to share all the research details, and where negative results are rarely included. A small but growing number of scientists and researchers are beginning to harness these Web 2.0 technologies as a transformative way of doing science. With the advent of service oriented architectures, the model of chaining services to create analysis workflows provides the research community unprecedented opportunity to collaborate, sharing their workflows with one another, reproducing and analyzing research results, and leveraging colleagues´ expertise to expedite the process of scientific knowledge discovery. A crucial component needed for this unprecedented level of cooperation within the research community is a reusable, extensible and customizable environment for building collaborative ¿open science¿ portals for managing these shared analysis workflows. This paper describes the design and the development of Talkoot, a customizable ¿software appliance¿ to build collaborative portals for earth science services and analysis workflows.